George Zweig

quarks

...the concept of quarks as a physical basis for the scheme, having adopted the fanciful term from a passage in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. (The American physicist George Zweig developed a similar theory independently that same year and called his fundamental particles “aces.”) Gell-Mann’s model provided a simple picture in which all mesons are...

The beauty of the SU(3) symmetry does not, however, explain why it holds true. Gell-Mann and another American physicist, George Zweig, independently decided in 1964 that the answer to that question lies in the fundamental nature of the hadrons. The most basic subgroup of SU(3) contains only three objects, from which the octets and decuplets can be built. The two theorists made the bold...